第3章

These fifteen years had not gone by without leaving their mark upon our hero.He had done several things during their passage.For instance, he had written a play, very nearly proposed to the third daughter of a London clergyman and twice been to the Derby.Such events had, not unnaturally, had their effect upon the formation of his character and even upon the expression of his intelligent face.The writing of the play--and, perhaps, its refusal by all the actor-managers of the town--had traced a tiny line at each corner of his mobile mouth.The third daughter of the London clergyman--his sentiment for her--had taught his hand the slightly episcopal gesture which was so admired at the Lambeth Palace Garden Party in the summer of 1892.And the great race meeting was responsible for the rather tight trousers and the gentleman-jockey smile which he was wont to assume when he set out for a canter in the Row.From all this it will be guessed that our Prophet was exceedingly amenable to the influences that throng at the heels of the human destiny.Indeed, he was.And some few months before this story opens it came about that he encountered a gentleman who was, in fact, the primary cause of this story being true.Who was this gentleman? you will say.Sir Tiglath Butt, the great astronomer, Correspondent of the Institute of France, Member of the Royal College of Science, Demonstrator of Astronomical Physics, author of the pamphlet, "Star-Gazers," and the brochure, "An investigation into the psychical condition of those who see stars," C.B.F.R.S.and popular member of the Colley Cibber Club in Long Acre.

The Prophet was introduced to Sir Tiglath at the Colley Cibber Club, and though Sir Tiglath, who was of a freakish disposition and much addicted to his joke declined to speak to him, on the ground that he (Sir Tiglath) had lost his voice and was unlikely to find it in conversation, the Prophet was greatly impressed by the astronomer's enormous brick-red face, round body, turned legs, eyes like marbles, and capacity for drinking port-wine--so much so, in fact that, on leaving the club, he hastened to buy a science primer on astronomy, and devoted himself for several days to a minute investigation of the Milky Way.

As there is a fascination of the earth, so is there a fascination of the heavens.Along the dim, empurpled highways that lead from star to star, from meteorite to comet, the imagination travels wakefully by night, and the heart leaps as it draws near to the silver bosses of the moon.Mrs.Merillia was soon obliged to permit the intrusion of a gigantic telescope into her pretty drawing-room, and found herself expected to converse at the dinner-table on the eight moons of Saturn, the belts of Jupiter, the asteroids of Mars and the phases of Venus.

These last she at first declined to discuss with a man, even though he were her grandson.But she was won over by the Prophet's innocent persuasiveness, and drawn on until she spoke almost as readily of the movements of the stars as formerly she had spoken of the movements of the Court from Windsor to London, and from London to Balmoral.In truth, she expected that Hennessey's passion for the comets would cease as had ceased his passion for the clergyman's daughter; that his ardour for astronomy would die as had died his ardour for play-writing; that he would give up going to /Corona Borealis/ and to the Southern Fish as he had given up going to the Derby.Time proved her wrong.As the days flew Hennessey became increasingly impassioned.He was more often at the telescope than at the Bachelors', and seemed on the way to become almost as gibbous as the planet Mars.Even he slightly neglected his social duties; and on one terrible occasion forgot that he was engaged to dine at Cambridge House because he was assisting at a transit of Mercury.

Now all this began to weigh upon the mind of Mrs.Merillia, despite the amazing cheerfulness of disposition which she had inherited from two long lines of confirmed optimists--her ancestors on the paternal and maternal sides.She did not know how to brood, but, if she had, she might well have been led to do so.And even as it was she had been reduced to so unusual a condition of dejection that, a week before the evening we are describing, she had been obliged to order a box at the Gaiety Theatre, she, who, like all optimists, habitually frequented those playhouses where she could behold gloomy tragedies, awful melodramas, or those ironic pieces called farces, in which the ultimate misery of which human nature is capable is drawn to its farthest point.

In the beginning of this new dejection of hers, Mrs.Merillia was now seated in a stage box at the "Gaiety," with an elderly General of Life Guards, a Mistress of the Robes, and the grandfather of the Central American Ambassador at the Court of St.James, and all four of them were smiling at a neat little low comedian, who was singing, without any voice and with the utmost precision, a pathetic romance entitled, "De Coon Wot Got de Chuck."Meanwhile the Prophet was engaged for the twentieth time in considering whether Mrs.Merillia, on her return from this festival, would have to be carried to bed by hired menials.

Why?

This brings us to the great turning point in our hero's life, to the point when first he began to respect the strange powers stirring within him.